The present invention relates to printers and aligning media for printing on a printer. Some printers use a tray to hold a media for printing and also feed the media into the printer when the printer is prepared to place ink or other marking materials onto the media. This arrangement generally aligns paper and other media adequately for printing and use with a variety of software applications including word processors, spreadsheets, and slide show presentation managers. These applications print text and images on paper and other media and include a relatively wide margin on the edges and the areas around the text or images.
Some software programs perform alignment before printing by moving the images or text relative to the target media size in the printer. For paper, this can be done by identifying the size of the paper media being used (i.e., 8.5xe2x80x3xc3x9711xe2x80x3 letter size paper) and setting the margins in the application to shift the text or images. Alternatively, software programs also allow images and text to be aligned by moving the images and text left, right, up, or down in the document area. With each of these methods, getting text and images aligned properly in a document is an exercise of trial and error. It typically involves printing a few pieces of paper or media to see if the alignment is correct and then adjusting the position of the images and text on the page within the software applications.
It is difficult to justify this trial and error method of printing when the costs of the media are relatively high and the alignment process is tedious and difficult. This is the case when printing on compact disk (CD), digital video disk (DVD), and video compact disk (VCD) with ink jet printing devices. These media types cost a great deal more than paper or other lower costs media. Also, it is easy to see when the images and text printed on these types of media are not properly aligned as the margin between the circular images and the edge of the media is quite small. Further, symmetry between the images and these various media also makes errors in alignment easy to detect.
Conventional systems rely on the software applications to align the media in the printer by shifting the images as described above. Unfortunately, this can be a time consuming and tedious process given how little tolerance exists when printing on these particular mediums using ink jet printing devices or other printing equipment.